Wambua Sammy
9 October 2009
Nairobi — Hurtling at 140kph on Thika Road, it was just a matter of time before we were transferred to a hearse from the Toyota Hiace. Passengers held their breath, but I was not about to be killed by a dread-locked, twig-chewing idiot. Not after traffic policemen had gestured at the lunatic resignedly, if not knowingly. Police business would be good on his return trip from Mwingi.
After some overtaking manoeuvres, the death trap veered off the road but, somehow, the lunatic brought it back to the tarmac as passengers sighed: “Ngai vava, Mwathani.” After a few kilometres of sobriety the devil resumed possession of the man’s faculties, but I wasn’t going to let him do more than 100 kph. By slightly tugging at his dreadlocks, there was no way he was going to speed.
Now, hell hath no fury like a “rastaman” slighted. On the first attempt, he slammed on the brakes, disembarked angrily and slid open the passenger door ready to flush me out. Little did I know that my fellow travellers had had enough of him. Punches, slaps, handbags, chips and mobile phones were rained on the brute and a citizens’ arrest made.
Between Sunday and Monday, about 20 people, among them two innocent girls on their way to Sunday school, perished in road accidents. It means that by now, your patience with Commish Matthew Iteere (pictured) should have run out. It’s one thing to breathe fire in front of cameras. Acting is another, and he is not doing it.
Good Kenyans, it is incumbent upon you to grab any speeding PSV driver by the head and twist it until he sees his back. It will transport the new man at Vigilance House and the Lingala music-crooning minister to the unfamiliar world of action. Hopefully.
————In the 16th century, Russia used to take the biscuit for being the most backward country in Europe. Tired of this dubious distinction, a chap by the name of Peter the Great resolved that things had to change, but first he had to establish the cause of the backwardness.
“Beards,” it occurred to him, whereupon his Imperial Majesty ordered an empire-wide removal of facial hair. I read that the chaps entrusted with the task did a thorough job of it, as was evident in the heaps of hair one saw all over the country.
But alas! with beards out of the way, the Russians still had a lot of catching up to do with Austrians, Britons, Prussians and the French. Peter had cleared the physical beard, but they forgot the huge, luxuriant tufts in the average Russian’s mind.
I don’t know, but perish the thought that Kofi Annan could be deluding himself that something called Agenda IV will wipe out our unsightly political beards. Reforming the police, land policies and laws, implementing the administrative border review, rewriting the Constitution and creating jobs for the youth are a step in the right direction, but certainly not the ultimate solution.
We need shock therapy in order to respect reform. And, by the look of things, 2012 and thereafter is the time for it. If you think I am a prophet of doom just analyse the behaviour and utterances of our politicians and the skewed nature of appointments to strategic public offices. No physical and mental beards have been cleared as to yield a different post-election scenario. Period.
It didn’t work. At first, I thought it had to do with my inability to understand Chinglish in which the instructions were inscribed. Later I summoned a techno savvy friend, actually a transmission engineer, who assured me that “those things rarely work.”
Now these guys have erected a huge edifice in the form of letter A on Mombasa Road. “China-Kenya,” it screams to everybody entering or leaving Nairobi. Okay, they are fixing the road, but why not “Kenya-China?” you may ask.
————Have you seen the funeral home advert complete with brightly polished coffins? At this rate we will have surgeons waving livers, intestines, wombs and lungs on television. Naturally, advertisement copy writers will have a field day with lines like: “Allow Dr Everything into your internals. Survival guaranteed.”
ALL AFRICA.COM
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